Desire
by Tragedy Tay
Summary: You know how I get when I'm stoned, baby, she tells him when he brings it up haphazardly, It doesn't matter. I love you, and Cohen is just around, you know?


Title: Desire

Rating: PG-13

Summary: "_You know how I get when I'm stoned, baby_," she tells him when he brings it up haphazardly, "_It doesn't matter._ _I love you, and Cohen is just around, you know?_"

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Ryan does love Summer.

He always has.

He likes the way their relationship started, a quick fuck in a bathroom at some fashion show his second night in Newport. It was good, a hot chick and some expensive champagne. He laughed at her seductive way of sharing it, it's fucking champagne, not blow, but the way she glared at him, he figured it would be better to just drink it and shut up.

The next morning Seth came out, looking oddly drained, and tossed a crumpled piece of paper on his lap, with a bunch of curly numbers.

"_I'm going sailing,_" he said slowly, which seems weird for Seth, but then, he hasn't known him very long.

"_You got a boat?_" Ryan asks, and he looks down.

"_I do._"

He calls her, and the next night was spent in Summer's room.

And a lot of nights after.

And it could easily have stayed like that except for the way Summer talks.

And she talks.

High school is a blur of getting stoned with Seth and Summer in the backseat of a Range Rover, sometimes Summer's friends would join them, but it usually ended up with Summer on his lap with her lips all over his neck.

Or Summer on Seth, doing the same thing.

"_You know how I get when I'm stoned, baby_," she tells him when he brings it up haphazardly, "_It doesn't matter._ _I love you, and Cohen is just around, you know?_"

He does know, because in high school there was no escaping Seth. If he tried to spend the night at Summer's, Seth would ruin his plans by calling or alerting the Cohens "_accident, dude, accident, I didn't know you were...there, and they were like 'Seeeeeth, where preeeeshus Wyan?' and I was like-" _

It was a relief when college came, and he went to Berkeley, and Summer to UCLA. Sometimes he'd drive the six hours down 101 to meet her, but usually when he called she'd babble some excuse and come to him instead.

It was better that way, when Summer came to him, because when he went to see her people always asked her where her boyfriend was before she'd shoo them away or change the subject.

"_Who's her boyfriend?_" Ryan asked someone when Summer ran to get a soda.

"_He goes to another school,_" he said, and Ryan nodded a little. He goes to another school. "_But he's like always-_" and then Summer was back, sticking herself on Ryan's lap, and pulling him down to kiss.

He pretends not to notice when he finds one of Seth's old jackets in Summer's closet, and he can smell Seth in her bed, and he knows. Summer's boyfriend wears this jacket and sleeps in her bed and he's not Ryan. But it's just easier to shut up when Summer wraps her entire body around him, even if it seems like she's only doing it to make up for something.

There are other guys, he's sure, Summer is Summer, but they don't seem to matter. Ryan matters, he knows he does, because otherwise she would ditch him, and Ryan doesn't know how he would handle that.

And it's okay, because there are other girls too. He and Summer are square.

He hates that he loves her, hates that he can let her fuck his brother, fuck anyone she wants, and he can't explain it, but he loves her, because she's gorgeous and she's a bitch, and she can hit as hard as he can, so he doesn't have to so much.

When he walks in on them though, he can't stand it. They aren't fucking, they're dressed, even, but Seth is in her bed, and she's lying across his stomach, her head on his heart, and he's holding her back.

Ryan can't kill his brother, he loves the Cohens too, so instead he proposes to Summer the next day.

Summer pretends.

She pretends that he's enough, she shoves Cohen away, Luke, Zach, random fucks in college, when he proposes to her. She ignores the sick feeling in her stomach when he asks her, instead she just giggles when he stumbles over his words, and teases him until he gets out what he was trying to say.

She pretends she wants it. She pretends that she loves him. She pretends that he's Cohen.

Summer can marry him. Summer can be a good wife. Summer can wear white and sparkle and turn every head in the room. She can have a perfect wedding.

A good wife would tell him about the abortion. And about her dad having a heart attack. And all the depression meds she's on, how she twitches and trembles, and only having Seth wrapped around her makes her _still._

And a good wife wouldn't fuck his brother for six years.

Seth was drunk one night junior year, he started professing his love for all things Summer, touching her hair softly and kissing her mouth, pleading with her to break up with Ryan because she has to marry him, they have to be together because he loves her more than Ryan, his throat catches when he says his brother's name.

She laughed, and listened until he passed out in her lap, and she fell asleep easy that night, and waking up with him was different.

She enjoyed it.

Ryan doesn't know, he knows she wants Seth, he doesn't know how she's fucking addicted. He doesn't know how sick she gets when she can't have him, or what she'll do to keep from getting so sick.

She nodded twice, and they split a pack of cigarettes before having sex in her kitchen.

She could be happy.

When they get married, Seth doesn't come. Or, at least he says he can't come, but Ryan can tell he was there, because when he sees Summer she's bouncing and happy and yelling at him not to see her in her dress, and then two hours later she's red-eyed and miserable.

"Allergies," she tells him, and Ryan sort of stared at her, because Summer Roberts does not have allergies.

Then he thinks he can sort of see Seth hiding in the back of the church, more like he can feel Seth's eyes glaring at his back, and the way Summer fidgets as they say their vows, he knows she can feel it too.

Ryan decides that maybe getting his wife away from his brother is a good idea, so he packs up their stuff, and they move to Napa. Summer shops and works in some random office, and Ryan puts his architecture degree to use.

For a year, they're okay.

Summer smiles and fucks him senseless, and she stops going to their bedroom to sob whenever Seth calls them.

And then Seth stops calling them.

They have enough money now for a baby, and sometimes Ryan brings it up, but Summer always changes the subject, but one night, about six months after the wedding, she hisses into his ear as she rips off her shirt. "I went off the pill."

He smiles, and kisses her, and she laughs a little against his teeth.

In two months, she's pregnant, and she smiles a little uncertain smile at him when she hands him the positive test.

She tells him they should go back down to Newport, be by his family, and he nods, because even if Seth is there, he and Summer are having a baby, so it's okay.

Even when he comes home to Summer crying in Seth's arms, it's okay.

"Marissa died," she whimpers at him, and when Ryan moves to take her away from Seth, she shakes her head rapidly, and yelps, "No!" before burying her head in Seth's chest.

Ryan goes out and gets very drunk, and when he comes back home to Seth still in their apartment, he breaks his nose. "Fuck off," Ryan says, "stay the hell away from her. Get out." Seth doesn't hit back, he just kind of adjusts his arms around Ryan's wife, and Summer moves a little, making noises in her sleep. Ryan grabs her, and carries her into their room, leaving Seth alone.

Summer loses the baby the next day.

She goes back on the medication.

She doesn't want therapy, she just wants the drugs, she doesn't want anything else but the numb feeling she craves. Her doctor complies, prescribing her drugs that would work for epilepsy and schizophrenia. She trembles constantly and scratches at her wrists until they bleed when Ryan isn't there to stop her.

"Summer, baby, we can try again," he told her, while she was watching TV. "We can go for another baby."

"Don't want a baby. Got rid of baby. Cohen knows. Cohen."

Her doctor brings up hospitalization, but she sticks with the mini-pharm on her nightstand, popping the pills that will fix her.

Ryan swore, when his mom left, he promised himself, no more of this, no more carrying someone to bed every night, or brushing her hair because her hands were shaking too badly to do it herself.

But he doesn't want her to die.

She throws her stuff at his head, daring him to leave her, yelling about Seth, and about Luke, and about everyone, telling him everything and screaming at him to go, because they shouldn't be together.

Ryan just waits for her to pass out, and watched her sleep for awhile.

It was like he was fourteen again.

So he sleeps with Teresa, because he may as well take it all the way.

He's almost happy when he sees Seth in his bed with her the next afternoon, because at least she's not sobbing or screaming or shaking.

Ryan backs away, out of the house.

He borrows one of Summer's pill bottles too.

For the next few months, they had a silent understanding, Seth would come over after Ryan went to work, and he'd be gone when Ryan got home. Ryan thought about how insane it was, letting his brother babysit the wife he was having an affair with, but they both loved Summer, and neither of them were willing to bury her.

Alex is a nice distraction.

Summer was more easy-going then, smiling at Ryan, and having slow sex with him in the afternoons. She got pregnant and miscarried again, but she never knew until she started bleeding. It was still a blow, but she was so drugged she hardly noticed.

Summer shopped and ignored it all. She'd come home with her arms full of bags, all designer, all ridiculously expensive, and half of it was shit she'd never wear. She'd stop her car in Chino every Thursday and wait for some kid to come by and give her her little baggie.

Sometimes she fucked the kid. He looked like a brown-haired Ryan.

That made sense.

But it didn't matter.

Ryan ignored. Ryan slept in his office. Ryan went to the bar.

Ryan didn't know what the fuck he was doing, but he just wanted it to end, and he had the divorce papers ready. He was just putting off the inevitable.

He walked in, and Summer was flushing all her pills down the toilet.

"I'm pregnant," she told him, and he nodded, and shredded the papers that night, putting his head down on his arms.

Summer didn't let Seth come over anymore, sometimes he called, but she shook her head. Ryan thought maybe she was giving them a chance, now, and he felt kind of like he loved her again, now that she would talk to him, and now that she wasn't so drugged that she was nuts.

She let him make her an appoinment with a therapist, and she seemed a little better after that, sort of lighter.

When she made it to the second trimester, she was all smiles, giggling and pulling him back to their bedroom when he had to leave for work.

He missed a lot of work then.

"I love you," he whispered into her hair, and she smiled blissfully.

"I love you," she said back, and he could almost forget all the times that she'd cry for Seth in her sleep. He could almost forget Seth. He could almost trust her again, but then, they'd never not been cheating on each other, so it was all kind of new.

By now her stomach stuck out, and her hands were always resting on it, like she was protecting herself, like the baby was in danger. He was the same way, always walking in front of her, keeping an eye out.

They needed this baby. It was their last chance.

Ryan sort of knew that they might not last. Too often, they left each other alone, and went days without saying anything, not because they were mad at each other, but just because they had nothing to say.

Summer needed words, and Ryan didn't, and they were sort of fundamentally different people. They had good sex, they got along fine, they just really weren't anything special.

He wondered how he's gone so long without realizing that.

Summer still wrapped herself around them, and kissed his neck before they went to sleep, but they'd wake up on opposite sides, and maybe that meant something. Ryan didn't know, he was never too great with philosophy, or whatever this shit was.

When the baby kicks though, when he feels it, he loves her. A deep, no words feeling, and that's what keeps them going. Or at least him, while he listens to her still cry sometimes, she tells him it's hormones, but he knows what she wants.

And then they're back to square one.

"I'm not happy," she whispered to him once, and he nodded slowly.

"I know."

"I'm sorry," she said, but she was used to guilt, she'd been living with it ever since she dragged Seth out of English class and went down on him in the backseat of her car. Seth looked at her like nobody else ever did, like...she couldn't explain it. But she craved it, she needed it too much.

So the next time Ryan went out she called him and begged him to come over in a pleading voice, which he did right away, and again she was guilty, because she couldn't just leave Ryan for him.

Summer was fucking with everyone, both literally and metaphorically, and she felt like shit for doing it.

But she needed them both, needed Ryan because he'd always been there, and needed Cohen for some cosmic reason that she couldn't describe.

He ran his fingers over her naked stomach that night, and they were both thinking the same thing that they, and Ryan too, were to afraid to voice.

"I love you," he said, sort of to her, sort of to her stomach, and the baby kicked out when he did.

"I..." and she didn't finish, just nodded, and pulled him closer to her, needing him to cover her, and take her away from her shitty marriage, and the baby that she was afraid of.

"Let's leave," he says, like he's reading her mind, but maybe they just think the same. She's supposed to be like Ryan, broken home, shitty childhood, but she's not. They don't fit. "We can go, we can go anywhere we want. We can have the baby."

"Ryan's baby," she murmured absentmindedly, and Seth deflated slightly.

"Do you know?" he asked her quietly, and she shrugged.

"It's Ryan's baby, Seth. It has to be Ryan's baby, or everything will fall apart. So it's his." She nodded, all the while kissing him, and breathing in against his skin, wrapping her arms around him, and then shaking her head, because she's a contradiction in herself, and she's never really been sane.

"Summer," he whispers, and she shakes her head, even as he pleads with her to go, to escape, because they're all in a circle mixed with a triangle.

She's Summer Roberts-Atwood. Boys are on their fucking knees for her.

But then Seth tells her something cheesy and lame, and she can't stand him anymore, and she longs for Ryan and the silent understanding they have.

Really, she just needs them both. Maybe Seth a little more, but if she was with only him, she'd probably just keep cheating, but with Ryan this time.

She felt bad for her poor baby. It will end up a fuck up like its mommy. And its daddy, either one, because none of them are quite right, they all have flaws. Summer's are just more on the surface.

That night, she dreams that she loses the baby, Ryan fucks her, Seth strokes her hair, and her mom dies. She wakes up smiling.

Summer decides to leave them. With the three of them, there's nothing good, nothing easy, and nothing works, so maybe they just all need to be alone. She leaves a note for Ryan, taped to the coffee maker, and a rushed voicemail for Seth before she tosses her phone out the window.

She drives until she's tired, and then she gets a room, orders a pizza, and sleeps until she ready to drive more. She sleeps alone for the first time in years, with her arms wrapped around her large stomach, cradling the baby she's never seen.

One night, about two weeks after she's left, she calls Ryan. He yells when he hears her voice, he finally yells, but it's too late, and she hangs up. Then she calls Seth, and he babbles incomprehensible words, so she assures him that she's fine and hangs up on him too.

She calls Taylor, and they talk about the baby for an hour, and Summer considers just becoming a lesbian.

She dreams of Seth's fingers and Ryan's eyes, and she wakes up crying.

She's not sure what the hell she thinks she's doing, she's mostly using up the last of her inheritance on a tour of shitty motels. If she weren't pregnant, she'd find some dude to fuck, just to keep with the norm, but her stomach is big now, and the baby's dropped, she knows she doesn't have very long now.

But driving around and blasting music is peaceful, and she can forget all about her ruined marriage, and whatever it is she is to Seth.

She fantasizes briefly about getting an apartment, and a job, and just staying here, wherever she is, just her and her baby, just the two, no more threes. But then her heart aches and her head aches, and she knows she needs them, she loves them both too hard, she can't just stay away.

When they both come and get her, she doesn't have a choice, as they pull her back to the car without speaking.

She feels vaguely like she's being kidnapped, but she's too tired to care.

She misses the medication.

Ryan drives, and she sits in the passenger seat, gazing out the window, or at Seth in the mirror, not thinking. None of them talk, and Seth seems so completely foreign without words coming out of him like air. She doesn't like it. There have been many times when she thought she would, but his voice is part of him, like Ryan's stoicism, or Taylor's optimistic streak, or Sandy's eyebrows.

She giggled a little at that last one, and Seth and Ryan both looked at her oddly, and she realized they thought she was insane again.

Being home was weird. She didn't feel right there, she felt out of place in a way that she never had before. It was nice getting away from all the unsaid shit, just her and her stomach, and now it's all hitting her again. Seth has been staying away, and Ryan's been working from home like she needs a babysitter, and she resents it.

She wasn't nuts to leave, but fuck if she wasn't nuts to stay.

She hits full-term on her pregnancy, and she starts obsessively checking her stomach, poking it to make sure that the baby is still kicking, because now it's a baby, and if this one goes, she'll have a dead chld, and that will kill all three of them, their demented little threesome, and she needs for them all to be okay for once.

She needs Seth too. More than she can put into words.

Her water breaks half an hour into a Valley marathon, and she sort of groans at her kid's bad timing.

Then a contraction hits, and she groans again, escalating it into a scream.

By the time they're at the hospital, she's crying, and begging Ryan to call Seth, her stupid little brain is telling her that she needs him too, but then she won't let go of Ryan's hand to let him go use his cell phone. She kicks and screams and finally she has the baby in her arms, and she's crying for another reason entirely.

She won't be needing a paternity test after all.

Ryan, to his credit, doesn't blink twice at the baby that has his best friend's face. He just kisses his little head, and then Summer's, maybe he knew all along.

Summer can't stop crying, hiding the baby against her under the guise of feeding him.

Everything is going to change now, she's sure. And now she begs Ryan not to call Seth, he can't know about this, this will kill him. They should just leave, or they should go back nine months and fix this.

But then the baby makes a tiny little noise, and she wouldn't change him for anything, because he's too perfect, he's everything perfect all at once.

"I had curly hair," she offers weakly, "when I was a baby," but Ryan just looks at her warningly. She rubs a hand over her face, her head hurts with this. "Fuck," she murmurs, rocking the baby, and she offers him to Ryan, let him hold the baby that's she's resigned to letting him raise with her, but he kind of glances away, shaking his head only slightly.

Something is going to change, and Summer doesn't like change. It's why she's stayed with him all these years, to the point of having Seth's baby with him.

She glances back at her son, and it was kind of unnerving, staring into her own eyes, the one part of her baby that isn't his father, and she can kind of see how she's kept them both all this time, because her son's eyes are the most captivating things she's ever seen in her life.

"I'm gonna go home," Ryan says in a weird voice, "I'll be back tomorrow."

Summer nods, not looking up from the baby.

She dreams of nothing at all, and wakes up to a baby's cry. Seth's mouth, begging her for something, Seth's face screwed up and screaming.

Seth doesn't come to see them in the hospital, and Ryan keeps Sandy and Kirsten out, lying that the baby is sick, and that Summer is too.

They keep up that story when they get back home, and Summer is almost relieved when she and the baby both catch a cold, and pass it around to each other. She has the new mother panic, but this makes everything easier, and it's good that at least one thing is easier. Ryan is happy too, he builds it up in his head, keeping Summer and the baby in the bed, and generally acting like a drama queen.

Seth calls to see how sick she is, and she refuses to speak to him. This can't go on forever, she knows, but it can go on enough for them to move maybe, or something. She's leaving it to Ryan for now, having a kid is exhausting her, mentally and physically, and she can't think of anything but Eli.

Having Seth in their house in baby form is driving Ryan a little nuts, it's a constant reminder that he wasn't good enough, that Summer can't ever be fully his now, and he needs to take them away, Summer and the baby that he hardly touches.

"Wake up Summer," she hears at 2 AM one night, and she opens her eyes blearily. "Come on, we're going."

"Ryan?" she whispers slowly, reaching one hand out for Elijah, only to have Ryan grab it and pull her up.

"We're going," he repeats, pulling her close to him.

"What?" she says, backing away slightly, trying to get a grip on what was going on.

"Here's your baby," he says, "I have your shit in the car."

"Ryan, stop," Summer says, shaking her head. "We can't leave."

"No, we're gonna leave," he tells her. "Want to drop the kid with his dad?" he hisses, in a burst of rage.

Summer shakes her head, cradling her son closer, giving Ryan a death glare.

"Okay," Ryan says once more, sort of apologetic, but mostly manic. "I packed, go get in the car."

"But-"

"Summer!" Ryan snaps loudly, and the baby stirs. "I have let you do a lot of _shit_ since we got together, and now you're going to do this for me. Okay?"

Summer got in the car, in the back with the baby, still confused, and still unsure of anything except for the fact that she needed her family to be together. But Seth was her family too.

This wasn't right either, but she didn't know what to do.

Ryan sort of glared her into silence for the entire ride to wherever they were going. She just sat in back, reading random magazines he would drop on her lap, and nursing the baby when he would wake up, watching his little fingers clench and open, and smiling a contented smile that Ryan resented.

But he had her with him, and Seth didn't know where they were, and he managed to calm down a little bit, because nothing was more important than keeping Seth away from Summer and Eli, and he was doing a good job of it.

They stayed in random motels again, Summer remembered which ones were better from her little trip about two months ago. They slept on motel beds, and Ryan didn't touch her, and she told herself it was because of the baby, the doctor said no sex.

But she was sure it had been long enough now, and by then they were in some shit apartment in Chicago.

"Better than Chino," Ryan mutters, his arms around her, and she laughs too hard at a joke that's not really that funny.

Ryan gets a construction job, and leaves her in the apartment with the baby and no money. He doesn't even leave enough for a pretzel, because that's how he can keep her, she wouldn't walk back to Seth. He keeps them tied to him like that, and he starts to touch the baby sometimes, starts to coo at him while Summer is making food or in the bathroom.

"_Hey, buddy,_" Ryan says, rubbing his hand over Eli's stomach, "_smile at Daddy._"

And Eli giggles and waves his hands, and Summer sort of smiles.

This was what Summer wanted, them and the baby, and no one else, but it's becoming hellish, because she has nothing, nothing but Ryan, and he's not enough, he's never been enough.

Nothing is ever _enough_, and she's always reaching.

Summer can't be happy being so dependant, but she has no choice, and that scares her.

Ryan won't relax, and he won't touch her, except to fuck her enough that she gets pregnant again, about two months in.

She can't get rid of it. She has no money, and even if she did, Ryan doesn't make enough anyway.

Ryan spends some of the money, not much because he's too smart for that, and Summer resents him for it, on cheap vodka. Her face twitches when he offers the bottle to her, but she can't drink, because of the nursing and the new baby that she can't tell him about.

One night they scream and yell at each other so much that she kind of wishes they would just hit instead.

Her hands ache to slam into Ryan's jaw, to bruise and mark and ruin.

And if he hit back it would justify what she was going to do now.

"Ryan?" she whispers one night, he's rocking the baby on his bare chest, his heartbeat soothes Eli more than anything else sometimes, his old, ratty bathrobe hanging off of him.

Summer takes a second to stare at the brown curls against Ryan's stomach, closing her eyes at it. It doesn't matter.

"Yeah?" he asks softly, grinning at her as he rubs her baby's back, and so he's drunk.

"I love you," she whispers shakily, wobbling when the new baby kicks her, and then she wants to collapse. "I'm pregnant," she blurts out suddenly, fuck her mouth, fuck her words.

"Oh." Ryan squints at her. "Okay." He's sober enough to know not to move, Eli's been having some sleep issues lately, and a few silent hours would be a blessing.

"Yeah," she says, her knees still shaking hard enough that she's sort of swaying where she stands. "Hold Eli for me," she finally decides on, and then she stumbles her way to the bathroom, not letting herself hesitate before she crams the pills into her throat, the painkillers from when Ryan wrenched his back last month, the sleeping pills for when he finally gets home and will take the baby for a few hours, the...fuck, she doesn't even know what these are, but she loves them, she caresses them with her tongue like they're Ryan's dick or Seth's neck, and she's starting to feel a little black.

"Sorry baby," she slurs out, "I'm so sorry."

"Summer?" she hears, and she twists her head a little, when did she fall on the floor? "Summer, hang on, I'm calling an amubulance," and then Ryan is gone, and she can hear her son bawling, and why won't she leave?

"Why?" Ryan asks, cradling her head in his lap.

"Nothing's enough," she whines, that's the one right thing, that spoiled brat Summer Roberts Atwood Cohen Atwood Cohen Roberts what-_ever_, her last words will be a bratty little squawk.

But maybe she didn't say anything at all.

She wants Seth there to trace her face while Ryan kisses her head.

_It doesn't matter_, she starts to think, but then...

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Seth comes, and takes his son, tears shining on his cheeks the whole time, only ceasing briefly when he picks up the baby who coos at him with Summer's smile.

Ryan lets them go without a word or a glance. Ryan puts his fist through a wall. And then another. And then he leaves.

Summer floats away from them.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

end.

I have like four alternate endings to this, which I may post, if I'm ever bored.


End file.
